This is the software part of by balkony gardener hobby project.
I am a bad gardener, and a lazy one. I have no clue when to water the plants and what else to do with them - I just like to have them on my balkony growing and following the flow of time. Also, I like to travel on vacations so there're many days in a row where they would get no water and just dry out.
So why not build some water pumping system that does the job for me?
- take a beer crate
- make some holes
- put a raspberry pi it
- connect a relais to the pi
- connect a pump to the relais
- write some software for control
So this project here is about controlling the balkondy-gardener-machine.
Every evening it waters the plants, there some configurtion of how long which pump wil do the watering.
There's a web-interface to trigger the tasks on demand.
It also shows a list of time series data from sensors.
I also connected an arduino with 4 moisture sensors to gather data, put it in sqlite db and display the data in a graph. The idea was to trigger watering only if plants need water. Somehow those moisture sensors did not work repliably.
With arduino kits often comes an ultrasonic sensor that measures ditances. I use this to measure the filling level of the water tank.
This project worked out well in terms of watering and manual control via the webinterface.
Raspberry pi is very robust, in the first years during winter I put the whole crate inside. The last year I left it outside, and it is still working.
Sensoring part would need more attention.
Even if the sensors themselves did not work good, the arduino connected
to the pi via usb putting data through a serial, connection worked very well.
